Hi everyone

We had an exceptional start to the user group sessions last night with a great turn out of 40+ people- Well done! A special thanks to the Salesforce.com team (Aden Forrest, Jeff Challis, Stuart Jones and Diana Wells) for providing the refereshments, spot prizes and the overview of the Winter 09 Release features.

With the amount of content (and users) that we had last night, there wasn't a lot of time to discuss what we all want to get out of the user group, how often we want to meet etc. As discussed, I will be sending out an on-line survey at some stage over the next few weeks which will aim to get your feedback regarding your current set-up, areas that you have strengths in, areas you want to focus on in future user group sessions etc.

The survey will also seek to establish who amongst you would be willing to contribute by either presenting at, hosting, or sponsoring a future session.

One of the surprises for me last night was the fact that the vast majority of users had had less than 12 months experience with Salesforce.com. With that in mind, I think there is a real need to ensure that we cover the fundamentals well, with focussed sessions on things like effective contact management before we start worrying about 'bells-and-whistles'. The survey will hopefully capture your thoughts regarding what our initial focus should be - in the interim, let us know your thoughts by posting a comment to this blog.

Attached is the presentation that we were taken though by Jeff Challis and Stuart Jones- it was a bit of a whirl-wind tour last night so it's great to be able to go through the ppt at your own leisure (there are great notes for each of the slides as well). We've tagged each of the features to show which Salesforce.com editions they are relevant to.

Thanks again to everyone who came and/or contributed last night- see you all at the next session. In the mean-time, keep an eye-out for the survey!

Cheers, Craig & Kirsten

Download Usergroup_kickoff_181108.ppt